1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data linkage support system and a data linkage support method, and more particularly, to a technique enabling linkage of accounting data variously different in specification between companies to be consolidated under favorable cost performance and efficiency.
2. Description of the Related Art
Between a subsidiary company and a parent company subjected to consolidated accounting, an operational arrangement is established such that the parent company collects various data associated with a business activity in the subsidiary company and applies the data to an accounting process. Particularly, an enterprise group including a plurality of subsidiary companies has, for example, a server for order reception/placement and production management of products operated by the subsidiary companies and a financial accounting server for consolidating accounting data of the subsidiary companies operated by the parent company, and has an arrangement for giving and receiving the data between the both servers. The various data exchanged in this way include a wide variety of data such as credits, debts, sales, purchasing, money received, payment, and manufacturing cost in the subsidiary companies classified by items, may not be directly processable in the financial accounting server of the parent company in many cases, and generally go through a data conversion process between the servers.
With regard to such a technique, for example, for the purpose of easily converting data by changing simple query information even when specifications of transaction data of a conversion source or specifications of accounting data of a conversion destination are changed, a data conversion device (see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2011-081702) is proposed that stores data acquired from an interface table, which has data taken over from a transaction data table, into an accounting data table for common fields related to general items of accounting data and that acquires data identifying records of the transaction data table by reference to the interface table for non-common fields related to the other items, thereby storing data of fields identified by the query information from the identified records into the accounting data table.
On the other hand, if a plurality of subsidiary companies is located in respective countries different from that of a parent company, the definition and the numbers of items of data managed by the subsidiary companies are often different from each other depending on legal regulations of the countries. Since laws are revised at different paces and have various details in foreign countries, it is considered that the definition and the numbers of items of data described above may be changed at various frequencies in the subsidiary companies.
If the data conversion process described above is established in accordance with such a situation, a system executing the data conversion process must highly frequently be altered and updated for confirmation of definition of data managed by the subsidiary companies and reconfiguration of programs corresponding thereto, requiring considerable costs and efforts. On the other hand, even if the person in charge of each of the subsidiary companies makes such alterations to the system, this is impractical because of a high technical restriction.